Teaching Quadratics

  I am getting ready to teach quadratics in about a week and a half.  I"m looking for new ways to teach it so I don't do the same old same old and maybe make it more interesting.

I have two different apps on the iPads I can have students use to practice factoring but I'd like to do something other than teach it in my standard way.  So I did a web search and came across a few nice ideas.

First is Tic Tac Toe: Quadratic Factoring which uses a Tic-Tac-Toe grid to help factor quadratics.  It comes with a complete lesson plan to use and includes all of the necessary papers.  I am not familiar with this method but it looks like it is worth learning and sharing with students.

I believe that it is important to share several ways of doing anything so students find a method that works for them.  Back to the lesson, it includes objectives, a powerpoint to present the method, guided practice sheets and independent practice sheets along with both formative and summnative assessments.

I have to teach completing the square so again I did a search and ended up at the same place as before looking at a Hip to be (completing the ) square.  I only know of one way to do it and it is long and tedious so I needed help finding material that might make it a bit more exciting.  This has a way I've never done it before.  It actually uses a 2 by 2 square and might actually be easier than the way I learned.  Cool.

In fact, I did a search of the cpalms site and there were 188 lessons that popped up when I typed quadratics in the search.  188 complete lessons!  The lessons cover transformations, graphing,  the easy vertex form, real life applications and all sorts of other aspects of quadratics.

I found a lovely Dan Meyers basketball task introduce quadratic/parabolas to the class.  This looks like  a cool hook to use to get the students interested.  This came from a a website that has ideas for introducing the topic, including the vocabulary.  I love the idea of borrowing other people's suggestions to use in my own classroom.

This site, Better Lessons,  has a nice entry and exit ticket in addition to ideas on the order in which to teach the topic.  It has a lovely video with instructions on doing a think, pair, share to discuss the ideas from the video.  It has everything needed to teach this lesson.

Ok, I am set, now all I have to do is sit down and plan.